Wrapped in a protective cocoon between her father and her daughter, Chaya Schlanger is ready to speak publicly for the first time since terrorists robbed her of the man she married 19 years ago: Eli Schlanger, known to so many simply as “the Bondi Rabbi”. But Chaya can barely get the words out. “I feel like without faith I think I would fall apart,” she says, clearly struggling. “The only thing we have really is to have our hopeful faith held on to” Faith. Family. Community. “It’s the only way I think we can survive,” she says. Her father, Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, is by her side. Her husband’s friend and mentor. On the other side, Priva, her 16-year-old daughter. Three generations who have seen and endured too much for one family. Speaking about what happened on that terrible day in December comes more easily for Rabbi Ulman. He has had no choice. Even in the minutes after finding his beloved son-in-law dead among the 15 slain he had to bury his grief and look after his shattered congregation.
Priva has found her own way, continuing the work she and her father started in building the Bondi chapter of an international organisation for Jewish teens. But Chaya is visibly struggling with the weight of her loss. “I’m just dealing with life, I mean, we have to continue,” she says. “We’ve got no choice, I’ve got five kids, I’ve got family, we have to continue.” Chaya Schlanger is finding comfort through her children and community. Chaya Schlanger shares her deeply moving story of resilience, carrying on a lasting legacy of Rabbi Schlanger. London-born Rabbi Schlanger was a familiar face around Bondi, but also at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, where he ministered to patients and families, and in prisons around the state, where he would often drive for hours to be with inmates. NSW Corrective Services staff formed a guard of honour at his funeral. Other rabbis called him a “rough diamond”, he told writer Nikki Goldstein, which he liked because it reflected his authenticity and knockabout charm.
Eli was killed weeks before the pair were to write the final chapter of their book Conversations With My Rabbi, to be published this week. “Not many people walk with God in a moment-by-moment, real-time way,” Goldstein writes of her friend. “It made him electric, somewhat eccentric, and very alive.” In those first two weeks of December, Eli was busier than ever, organising what had by now become his own personal project: the Chanukah by the Sea festival at Bondi. The celebration has always had a special place in the Ulman and Schlanger families. Rabbi Ulman first organised the event more than 30 years ago, in 1994. Eli stepped in to help in 2007 and soon was running the whole thing. Eli and Chaya were both there that day, with their two-month-old son. Eli performed mitzvot and the Jewish tradition of wrapping tefillin around the arms of the faithful.
Rabbi Schlanger had made the Chanukah by the Sea festival his personal project. Chaya was hit in the back by shrapnel as she tried to shield her baby, who was also injured in the attack and had to be hospitalised. Friends would later tell Sky News that Chaya was still protecting her child when she saw that her husband had been hit and was not moving. “She kept saying ‘Wake up Eli, you have to wake up’. Eli was a believer in miracles and she said to him: ‘Make a miracle for me, you can’t leave me, I’ve got five children, I can’t do this on my own’,’’ one friend said. Rabbi Ulman was walking to the event when the shooting started. “I saw people running and when I came by the police station, I found out that it was a shooting and I tried to call him and he didn’t answer,” he says. “I called a young student who was working for us, and he told me that Eli is down and I don’t know exactly what it meant at the time, but he said he was also wounded, and he needs a paramedic.
“That’s when I came to the beach. The shooting must have just stopped when I came there, but it was a devastation.” What happened next is a blur to Chaya: “Definitely a lot of family, friends, and community support. And a lot of people coming from all over the world, from people who don’t even know who we are, to people who are close to us, just coming. And over the past few months, still coming, a lot of showing up.” Does she ever ask, why Eli? No, she says. “I ask, how does this happen in Bondi? I grew up in Bondi, I was born here and lived here my whole life, got married and lived here with my kids, so it’s definitely a very weird and a hard thing to swallow that it just happened in our backyard. It’s very hard to imagine how someone could do such a thing. It’s something I can never understand. I have no idea.” Only months before he died, Eli had become increasingly concerned about the rise in antisemitism and had written to Anthony Albanese asking him to rescind Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state.
“As a Rabbi in Sydney, I implore you not to betray the Jewish people and not God Himself,” he wrote. “Throughout history, Jews have been torn from their land again and again by leaders who are now remembered with scorn in the pages of history. You have an opportunity to stand on the side of truth and justice.” The Prime Minister would later say he never saw the letter. Chaya doesn’t want to cast blame for what happened at Bondi. But could more have been done before the attack to quell the rising hatred? “Of course, it didn’t come out of nowhere, there’s been a lot happening around the world,” she says. “Still, I think we don’t look to point fingers – we just try to show the opposite of hate. “We just want to show that we just believe in love and light and living in unity and accepting each other for who everybody is, everyone’s faith, everyone’s beliefs.” Rabbi Schlanger was well known for his repeated response to antisemitism: “The way forward is to be more Jewish, feel more Jewish, look more Jewish.”
Chaya says: “It’s who we are. We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of or hide from it. We don’t feel like we’re doing anything wrong. All we want to do is put out a positive, happy love and respect for each other. So how could you hide from that if you think that’s the right thing to do?” Chaya won’t be drawn on what she thinks should happen to the gunman who killed her husband, only that she is hopeful she will see justice. But Rabbi Ulman has no doubt what should happen to the man who killed his son-in-law if he is found guilty of the charges he faces. “The world is not a jungle,” he says. “People who commit crimes, they have to face responsibility. In Australia, there’s no death penalty. I personally believe that in very rare situations, I think such a person should not live. “And it’s not a feeling of revenge; it’s a feeling just that some people forfeit the right to live.” If found guilty, the gunman “shouldn’t see the light of day”, says Rabbi Ulman. If convicted, “he should be incarcerated for the rest of his life”.
Still at school in Year 12, Priva has seen antisemitism close up. She watched as the storm clouds built after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. “Seeing so much unbelievable hate, you’re like, how is this even possible?” she says. “As a kid you see the world as some bright happy place and then you go online and you see all this hatred and you’re just shocked. “I was walking on the street with my father once. We had someone drive past and yell at us, Free Palestine or F..k the Jews, and I was just like, whoa, I’m in Sydney, like, it was so confusing.” Priva is determined to continue her father’s work, throwing herself into the international CTeen conference that brings together Jewish teenagers from around the world to build Jewish identity, leadership skills and friendships. She and her father started the Bondi chapter of the group a year ago. “He said, ‘I’m going to start it with you, but it’s going to be yours, you’re going to take it up’,” Priva recalls.
Rabbi Schlanger often visited those in jail who needed him. In February, Priva travelled to New York, speaking at several events, including to 6000 Jewish teens gathered in Times Square. “We don’t need darkness to turn on the light,” she told the crowd, to cheers. “Eli told them at a very young age … they’re capable of doing everything and anything they want, so they joined him in everything he did,” Chaya says now. “He included them in everything they did and they continued on.” Eli would take Priva on his hospital rounds or when he was giving out packages to the elderly for Pesach (Passover). “He was the best dad,” says Priva. “He really saw” – she stresses the word – “saw all his children and spent most of his time thinking about how he can help us through life and he really made each one of us feel heard and spent a lot of quality time with all of us, especially me, as a teenager. He was like my best friend.”
Towards the end of our interview, Chaya tries to explain why the Bondi attack is still, for her, so utterly incomprehensible. “It’s strange because people say, how did we not see it coming, with everything that’s been happening?” she says. “But the truth is, we’re the type of people who would never dream of doing something like that. When you don’t have that hate, how do you even know how to relate to that?”
Source: Compiled by APN from a media article.
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